Tech Talks

Airplanes, Spaceships, and Missiles: Engineering Lessons from Famous Projects

It is said that in success we stand on the shoulders of giants. In this, talk, we will explore some of those giants: the amazing machines from the US aviation industry of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Some of these machines flew with only human power, some flew to the moon, and some flew faster than a speeding bullet. These projects are interesting not only for the machines that pushed the boundaries of possibility, but also for their engineering practices: agile before the lean startup, caching before memcache, and monkey patching to save a mission. Some of the lessons learned were painful, some humorous, and all of them relevant to our modern software practices.

Bjorn is VP of Engineering at New Relic. He previously worked at the Eclipse Foundation, Amazon, and the famous-in-the-right-circle OTI. He hasn’t written any books, but he is a voracious reader and uses his multi-bedroom dwelling to store oodles of books including his extensive collection of US space program history books.